In the evangelical 1980s, regular appearances of “The Power Team” at local megachurches were great opportunities for desperate youth pastors to connect with bored young men. In the name of Jesus and by the power of the Holy Spirit, team members would take turns performing feats of strength. It was all designed to remind the boys especially that being a Christian wasn’t for wimps, that you could be “cool” and a Christian, too.
Honestly, I doubt they were very successful at either aim. Instead, events like this merely cemented in my own young mind, and in the minds of my peers, the already carefully crafted message we heard in our churches: Good Christians were always victorious. Victorious over embarrassing sins, victorious over cultural temptations, victorious over telephone books! God help you, however, if you weren’t victorious—if you struggled, if you failed, if all your feats of strength ended in an embarrassing whimper for help. As those boys became men, I wonder how many of them walked their pilgrimage with a limp, like I did. How many of them felt the frustration of remaining sin, knew defeat just as often as victory, and stuffed any honest engagement with sin deep down into their psyche? To succeed in the Christian life, I thought I could only acknowledge the sin I left behind, not the sin that continued to ensnare me. What wanna-be Power Team member could walk with a limp?
But limp we did and limp we do. Each one of us continues not just to fight against remaining sin, but to be marked by those battles we have fought and lost against sin. Since that’s the reality in which each of us lives, why do we pretend it is otherwise? We’re not fooling anyone, and we’re not helping anyone come to terms with the profound hope and confidence that comes—even for those who must live with the mark of their sin for the rest of their lives.
Count me among the remaining few who believe that Romans 7 describes the normal Christian life. This interpretation—now out of vogue among many New Testament scholars—is not just well attested historically, it is also experientially true. In Romans 7:14–25, the apostle Paul describes his battle against sin—not a former battle before he became a believer in Jesus the Messiah, not a hypothetical battle that a carnal Christian fights before becoming fully sanctified, but the very real and personal battle so familiar to all of us: “For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Rom. 7:15).
Sin is an ever-present reality for the apostle, just as it is for you and me. In fact, Paul goes on to describe the nature of sinful temptation in Galatians 5:17, “For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do.” We are at war with our sinful nature; and tragically, even though we have been set free from the guilt and corruption of sin, we sometimes freely give in to the temptations to sin. The tragic stories of men and women of great faith and hope in Christ who in a moment of sin torpedo their lives are a bracing reality for those of us in church leadership. We confront the truth of Romans 7 and Galatians 5 every day in our offices, as well as in our own hearts.
Occasionally, as part of God’s work of sanctification, we do see the power of particular temptations grow less severe, perhaps even to the point where we might claim a certain kind of victory over sin! But the problem with that language is that it puts us in the victor’s seat, and it gives us false assurance that the old temptation will never again raise its ugly head. An even more insidious implication of this way of thinking is that having gained some victory over sin, we should never have to fear the effects of that sin in our lives. There isn’t one of us who can honestly sing the sappy words of the camp song:
Little by little bit every day,
Little by little bit every way,
My Jesus is changing me
(Oh yes, he’s changing me).
Since I made that turnabout face,
I’ve been walking in His grace,
My Jesus is changing me.
The subtitle of one well-known pastor’s newest book is My Story from a Life of Obedience. The hubris of such a claim would be funny, if it didn’t lead others to think that they too could have such victorious faith. As the early Holiness movement adherents quickly learned, the only way they could achieve a state of moral perfection in this life was to redefine sin and obedience to something achievable and observable.
The English hymn writer John Newton famously wrote a letter that outlined the “advantages of remaining sin” to a friend who suffered from deep guilt and remorse over his sin. Newton reminds his friend that being aware of the remaining sin in our lives causes us to be humble before the Lord and others, knowing that our only boast is in the mercy and grace of Christ toward us, not in the opinion others may have of our victories over sin. Now, of course, there is a difference between simply being aware of remaining sin and glorying in that state. In Mere Christianity (HarperCollins, 2001), C. S. Lewis calls on his readers to resist temptation by comparing it to resisting the German army:
A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. You find out the strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. (142)
While we are not allowed as Christians to take a perverse comfort in the fact that we are and will continue to be sinners, we must still be honest about our state. Only one man ever perfectly resisted temptation: not for just five minutes, not for just an hour, but for thirty-three perfectly obedient years. Jesus was faithful to his Father and obeyed the law of God in thought, word, and deed so that we who are united to him might enjoy his status as the covenant-keeping Son and heir of all things!
As Christians, then, we walk the path of discipleship with a limp—still afflicted by the effects of remaining sin in our lives. I think that the Old Testament patriarch Jacob is a good analogy to our living with a limp today. Remember that Jacob, after tricking his father Isaac into blessing him instead of Esau, flees to his uncle Laban’s house. There he becomes wealthy and powerful. Married to two sisters, Rachel and Leah, he is blessed with many children. Eventually, Jacob’s family and wealth become a threat to his uncle Laban, and Jacob prepares to return home to Canaan to take up his inheritance—the same inheritance he received by deceiving his father, the same inheritance jeopardized by his brother’s angry threats against his life.
Jacob knows he must face Esau, but he doesn’t know if Esau will be gracious toward him or want to finally exact his revenge after so many years of Jacob’s exile. Genesis 32 tells us that Jacob prepared to meet Esau by sending messengers who would curry favor and project strength on Jacob’s behalf (vv. 4–5). The messengers returned with ominous news: Esau was coming to meet Jacob, along with an army of four hundred men!
Jacob responded to Esau’s display of strength by sending a peace offering: two hundred female goats and twenty male goats, two hundred female sheep and twenty male sheep, thirty camels and calves, forty cows and ten bulls, twenty female donkeys and ten male donkeys divided in nine groups. Each group was led by a group of Jacob’s servants. He sent wave after wave of animals and servants, saying the same thing: Jacob was willing (and able) to repay Esau all he had stolen in robbing Esau of the inheritance.
The night before Jacob met with Esau, he sent his family across the stream and waited alone. But sometime in the night, Jacob realized that someone else has joined him in the darkness, and he wrestled with this man all night long. After many hours of silent struggle, the daylight began to break. Jacob had held his own against this silent, violent stranger. Jacob hadn’t yielded. But with the first rays of light, Jacob felt the sharp pain of his hip being put out of socket. His pivot-power disappeared. Then Jacob heard the man’s first words: “Let me go” (v. 26). Can you imagine the desperation in Jacob’s answer, the pain as he tried to form his words? No longer looking for a move to pin him, he clung to him: “I will not let you go unless you bless me” (v. 26).
Jacob was an amazingly strong man (he singlehandedly removed the stone covering the well in Gen. 29), but his strength blinded him to the man’s identity. In verse 29, he asked the man’s name. Jacob, as he had so often before, blindly waded into battle, with a single eye focused on what he wanted—disregarding every sign to the contrary. Only afterward did he realize he had gone to the edge of the abyss and been rescued. That the man was God was a realization that dawned gradually upon Jacob. Surely he began to understand after he felt the man’s sudden strength, and his desire to leave before daylight could reveal him for who he was. All doubt was gone after the man renamed Jacob as Israel, the one who had striven with God.
The power of God on display in Genesis 32 is strange. Jacob “prevails” over God (v. 28). God’s power is manifested in his weakness! Jacob can only know God in God’s hiddenness and weakness, not in God’s power. Only as Jacob becomes weak in his struggle against God does his victory emerge. Isn’t it the same for us? As Gordon Hugenberger says about this passage, “When we thought we had overcome him and crucified the Lord of Glory, it was at that moment of hiddenness and divine weakness that Jesus stays the hand of judgment and bears the nail prints himself.” Our wounds and weaknesses reveal our greatest strength. God is not out to make each of us a member of the Power Team, but he is out to reveal to us the crippling power of the cross. As we die to ourselves, our rights, our strength, our positions of power, the great victory of God becomes ever more evident in our lives.
That’s a hard word to hear. It was hard for Jacob, because he wanted to end his encounter with God with glory, a glimpse into the hidden majesty of God. In much the same way, the disciples in Matthew 20 pestered Jesus to see who might sit on thrones next to him. Jesus responded by pointing them to cups of judgment, baptisms by fire, and crosses of death. The lesson through it all is that glory comes through shame and victory through weakness. Prevailing faith walks with a limp.
As a pastor, I often find myself in my office, in a living room, or across a café table trying to help people make sense of the mess they have made of their lives. They want so desperately to be free from the pain their sin has caused; they want so quickly to turn a page and get on with life. They want to know that they are forgiven and that everything will be okay. With profound gratitude to God for giving me the rights and responsibilities of my office, I gladly tell them that God in Christ has, in fact, forgiven them of their sin. But the joy and relief that absolution brings quickly fades as I tell them that God may not rescue them from the effects of their sin. Whether it is a relationship broken by infidelity or a body broken by addiction, these forgiven sinners may still walk with a limp for the rest of their lives. Part of pastoral counseling, of course, is to walk with them until the limp becomes more manageable, until they know how to more easily navigate life.
Are you limping through your pilgrimage? It isn’t a sign that you have failed to measure up, failed to achieve, failed to see victory. It is a sign of God’s victory; it is the way of the cross. It is the foolish, shameful path of victory, a sign of the blessing you have received from God. And it tells others that you have suffered the effects of sin, that you know the power of temptation, that you have felt the pain of loss, but that you have also seen the break of day. Walking with a limp is a testimony to God’s faithfulness to us; and it is far more effective than the testimony of the powerful, because it points others who feel the sharp pain of sin and misery to the God who has given them the ability to feel that pain and who promises to rescue them from the power of sin.
An unbeliever will never know the frustration over sin that Paul feels in Romans 7. Only those who have been set free from the bondage of sin can feel the pain of sin into which they so easily stumble or which they freely choose. And only those who know the redeeming power of God’s grace can walk gracefully with their limp—telling others that God is indeed faithful to rescue them, if not from the effects of their sin, then from his wrath against sin, so that they can be witnesses to others who like them cry out for relief, for deliverance, and for blessing.
Eric Landry is executive editor of Modern Reformation and pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas.
